If it’s difficult for the best players on the PGA Tour to hold a lead and win a golf tournament — and names as big as Rory McIlroy and Adam Scott are a couple who have blown leads on the final day at tournaments this year — it can’t be too extraordinary for a 14-year-old high-school freshman to sweat it out.

Shawnee Allen can point to an even-par 72 in her opening round that put her on the road to this year’s UIL Class 3A girls state individual title.

It’s the position Shawnee Allen found herself when she shot an even-par 72 in the opening round of the UIL Class 3A Girls State Tournament last month. Here was Allen, a freshman from La Vernia, teeing it up against a field that included two players who had won state championships in the last three years. Allen had a three-stroke lead, but it guaranteed her nothing — except for an uneasy evening before teeing it up in the final round the next day.

“I had the jitters. I was all over the place,” Allen said. “I’m surprised I got to sleep at night.”

Allen’s nerves cooled, and she actually added another stroke to her lead for a four-shot win in the UIL championship at the Wolfdancer Golf Club near Bastrop.

“She’s the most mature freshman I’ve been around,” La Vernia golf coach Kyle Andrews said. “You can’t tell by watching her whether she’s just hit a good shot or a bad one. If it’s a bad one, she just erases it and goes on to the next one. If it’s a good one, she builds momentum.”

Maybe it seems Allen has come from nowhere. She is the first golfer from La Vernia, where the only golf course in town has closed, to qualify for the state championship (the school was two players short of a full girls roster this year). The Wilson County community of some 1,200 people is known in the athletic world for high-jumper Dusty Jonas, who competed in the 2008 Olympics and finished third in the World Championship two years later.

To win a golf championship, Allen would have to beat Sarah Black of Andrews, who won the girls 3A title in 2011, and two-time defending champion Sarah Moore of Burkburnett. The closest those two were to Allen after her first-round 72 (that was the low score of the tournament) was six shots. Though Allen wasn’t as smooth with a second-round 77, it still was second-best of the day to Black’s 75 in windy conditions.

Allen has been this a while. Her grandfather and uncle gave her a few plastic toy clubs to swat around one-handed when she was about a year old.

“They were little ‘Snoopy’ clubs,” Allen said. “I remember them when I see me with them in Christmas pictures.”

By the time she was 5, her game outgrew the front yard and her parents took her to The First Tee in San Antonio. She began instruction with Brad Martin, who eventually became coach at University of the Incarnate Word, and she’s been playing in the Golf San Antonio Junior Championship at Brackenridge Park since she was 5.

“At some point after she turned 5 or 6,” her father Herman Allen said, “we were traveling to Houston or Austin for tournaments. And she always handled it well enough mentally that we would move her up one or two age groups.”

Burnout can be a risk, and Allen admits she felt it a couple of summers ago. She quit — for maybe two months.

“I wanted to get back,” she said. “I didn’t lose anything from my game, and I love it.”

During the fall Allen won a junior event at Fort Sam Houston’s Salado Course that was conducted by the Southern Texas PGA. Her best round during her district tournament was a 73, and she broke a tie for the lead after the first day of the UIL regional tournament with a 1-under 69 at Oso Beach Golf Course in Corpus Christi. She won by 10.

Suddenly on the golf scene, people are taking notice of Allen. She’s received her first contact from college recruiters; Auburn, currently ranked 24th in the nation, has mailed her a questionnaire. The smaller schools in the 3A ranks have produced noticeable players — Taylor Newlin of UTSA won a Class 3A girls championship as a freshman in 2007 for Frisco Wakeland (she won again as a senior when Wakeland moved up to 4A).

“I’ve been thinking of the college scholarship opportunities, and maybe that the college coaches are watching” Allen said. “So I wanted to put some low scores out there.”